Honan for Wired: “Facebook’s ‘Phone’ Is Another Triumph of Mediocrity”
“Maybe you were hoping for something radically new and different from a Facebook phone. If so, Zuck just broke your heart,” Mat Honan writes for Wired. “But so what. Facebook never does anything new. New doesn’t matter in the blue. What matters is this: What Mark Zuckerberg announced today runs software called Facebook Home that makes it easier for people to spend more time with Facebook. And that’s all he really needed to pull off.”
“In fact, the long rumored Facebook phone turned out not to be a phone at all. Or even a new OS or a fork of the Android operating system like Amazon’s Kindle Fire,” Mat Honan expalins.”It’s something more than an application, and slightly less than an operating system. As Wired.com editor Mark McClusky described it, Facebook Home is an “apperating system.” The genius of the Facebook phone is that the company made a phone without making a phone at all. It’s not overly ambitious. It’s not a big bet. And that’s why it may have such a huge payoff.”
“Facebook itself is a triumph of mediocrity. It’s not the best communications platform; that’s Twitter or WordPress,” Honan posits. “It’s not the best photo sharing app; that’s Instagram or Flickr or maybe even Snapchat. It’s certainly not the best app platform, the best address book or the best messaging service. Likewise, it’s so easy to hate on Facebook for privacy policies, or the annoying ads, or for constantly rearranging things, or the things your crazy uncle posts there or, well, hell — take your pick. But Facebook is really, really good at connecting people. And that means it can be just OK at everything else.”
Honan concludes that, “Facebook Home doesn’t even have to be a hit. At least not right away. The important thing is that it’s out there, and it didn’t require a lot of up-front capital or R&D investment in hardware. It’s a better strategy than anything else the company has done in mobile. People who already really like Facebook will also like this. For people who live in Facebook, it may even drive them to buy one handset over another. Sometimes mediocre is all it takes.”
